VRChat on Quest: Avatar Performance Woes
If you use VRChat on the Oculus Quest, you have probably seen your fair share of the “gray robots” — the generic placeholder avatar that VRChat uses in place of a user’s avatar in various cases. You’ve probably also noticed that there are a lot of them.
Why am I seeing a gray robot?
There are two main reasons you’ll see these placeholder “gray robot” avatars: Very Poor performance rank avatars, and avatars without a Quest asset available.
When an avatar is ranked “Very Poor” on VRChat for Quest, it is hidden by default. It will show as a gray robot with the text “Perf Blocked” on the chest, and you can’t see it until you click “Show Avatar” on each user you find wearing one. We do this to prevent performance issues on the Quest.
In addition, you’ll see more gray robots when you find someone using an avatar without a Quest version. These robots will show up with the thumbnail image of the avatar on their chest. Clicking “Show Avatar” on them won’t do anything. Think of it like trying to put a Blu-Ray disc into a DVD player — the player has no idea what the data is.
Okay, but why are there so many gray robots?
The primary reason for placeholder avatars on Quest is the “Perf Blocked” reason. The vast majority of avatars used on the Quest version of VRChat are ranked as Very Poor, and therefore are hidden by default. Out of the Very Poor avatars on Quest, most of them exceed the limits by 10x or more. This indicates that many Quest avatar authors are not making any attempts to optimize at all, and are instead uploading avatars intended for PC usage.
There’s a few reasons for this. Making a “Good” or “Excellent” avatar on Quest is difficult. The limits are quite stringent. We need to make it easier to make avatars that fit within the limits — or re-evaluate the limits themselves.
Our goal is to have as many avatars showing as possible. However, if we show many of these Very Poor ranked avatars at the same time, FPS drops, system memory fills up, and your performance tanks. In the worst cases, VRChat will send you back to your Home or just crash outright.
The secondary reason behind “gray robots” is when an avatar hasn’t been uploaded for Quest. This is a harder problem to solve.
Since essentially 100% of the content on VRChat is user-created, we’re going to be taking some steps to mitigate both major causes of the “gray robot problem”.
How is VRChat going to address Very Poor avatars on Quest?
Let’s start with the “Perf Blocked” gray robots. There’s a few pathways, but we’re starting out slow. Here’s our plan.
First, since the hardware landscape has changed a bit (and after some extensive benchmarking), we will be increasing the limits for the Very Poor, Poor, Medium, Good, and Excellent Performance Ranks. This will make it easier to create avatars that fall within the limits, and hopefully encourage authors to create optimized avatars. Initially we will be increasing the limit on polygon count for Oculus Quest specifically.
This is an approximate doubling (plus a bit more) of the previous limits for polygon count. We have some additional ideas for the Performance Rank system that may allow us to be more specific with where we’re applying pressure. If/when we decide to change or implement other limits, we’ll let you know. These changes will be coming out in our next release, which is currently in Open Beta.
To be clear, the above changes do not affect VRChat on PC.
Additionally, we will be taking some preventative measures to help “close the tap” of Very Poor avatars. Most of these avatars come from avatar worlds, so we will:
- Find the most popular avatar worlds with Quest avatar pedestals that are mostly (or all) ranked as Very Poor.
- Contact the authors of these worlds and request that they either optimize the models they have uploaded, or to remove them.
- If no action is taken, the worlds will be removed from search.
We have further actions planned, but for the moment, we would like to enact these changes and see how the community adapts. Our hope is that the loosened limits along with the pressure to improve avatar performance will help reduce the “gray robot” problem, as well as improve performance overall.
We will begin this process around the same time our next release goes out.
Alright, but what about PC-only avatars? They’re robots too.
Avatars that only have PC assets appear as a gray robot on Quest. We plan on addressing this with the Avatar Fallback system.
With Avatar Fallbacks, you will have the ability to choose an avatar to serve as your Fallback. If someone from another platform is looking at your avatar, but your avatar lacks an asset package for the platform they’re on, you will instead look like your Fallback.
You will be able to choose from a list of our default avatars as your Fallback. In addition, you can upload an avatar yourself to act as your Fallback avatar, but it must have a Performance Rank of Good or better and it must be marked as a fallback during upload. (That does mean you’ll need to reupload to use it). This fallback will be the same no matter what avatar you’re currently wearing.
As an example, if you are wearing a PC-only avatar while speaking to your friend who is on the Oculus Quest, they will currently see you as a “gray robot”. With the Fallback system, you will instead be able to choose how you appear to your friend while wearing any PC avatar that doesn’t have a Quest version! You can even choose one of your own avatars as your Fallback, as long as it meets the requirements given above and has been tagged appropriately during upload.
Avatar Fallback is a brand-new feature! You can read more about in our documentation. It’ll be coming out in our next release, which is currently in Open Beta.
We’re making these changes to help solve (or at least mitigate) some of the more difficult problems for our Oculus Quest community — “everyone’s a gray robot”, and “wow, where’d my frames go after i clicked ‘show avatar’ on that wolfboy?”
We deliberated quite a long time on how to address these issues! We decided on an approach that would both allow easier creation of avatars on the Quest platform, while also applying pressure to create performant avatars. We want to avoid hard limits on performance ranks on VRChat for Quest, but it may be an eventuality.
Going forward, we will continue to implement both technical and policy changes for VRChat on the Oculus Quest / Quest 2 to avoid the aforementioned “gray robot” and performance issues. In addition, we’re continuing our ongoing performance work for VRChat on Quest and PC.
We believe these changes will benefit the VRChat community as a whole, and will make it easier to make a performant Quest avatar!
